Holistic Management and Adaptive Grazing: A Trainers’ View

Abstract

Holistic Management (HM) is a grazing practice that typically uses high-intensity rotation of animals through many paddocks, continually adapted through planning and monitoring. Despite widespread disagreement about the environmental and production benefits of HM, researchers from both sides of that debate seem to agree that its emphasis on goal-setting, complexity, adaptivity and strategic decision-making are valuable. These ideas are shared by systems thinking, which has long been foundational in agroecology and recognized as a valuable tool for dealing with agricultural complexity. The transmission of such skills is thus important to understand. Here, twenty-five Canadian and American adaptive grazing trainers were interviewed to learn more about how they teach such systems thinking, and how they reflect upon their trainees as learners and potential adopters. Every trainer considered decision-making to be a major component of their lessons. That training was described as tackling both the "paradigm" level-changing the way participants see the world, themselves or their farm-and the "concept/skill" level. Paradigm shifts were perceived as the biggest challenge for participants. Trainers had difficulty estimating adoption rates because there was little consensus on what constituted an HM-practitioner: to what level must one adopt the practices? We conclude that: (1) trainers' emphasis on paradigms and decision-making confirms that HM is systems thinking in practice; (2) the planning and decision-making components of HM are distinct from the grazing methods; and (3) HM is a fluid and heterogeneous concept that is difficult to define and evaluate.

Effects of Grazing Management on Spatio-Temporal Heterogeneity of Soil Carbon and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Grasslands and Rangelands: Monitoring, Modelling and Upscaling

“…These inconsistences are mainly due to effects of spatial and temporal scales on both economic and ecological processes, in addition to inherent intra-and inter-annual variability of grazing land systems [10,19,20,[62][63][64]. Due to the large number of regulating factors within these grazing systems (Climate × Soils × Vegetation × Animal Species × Management), even a large number of field trials, all previously conducted field experiments cover only small parts of the real-world complexity.…”

“…A higher production under multi-paddock rotational grazing trials may not be reproduced by practitioners across all conditions. The conflicting management practices firstly are due to effects of spatio-temporal differences on, both, economic and ecological goals between the trials and on-ranch adaptive grazing management [20,117,118]. Fig.…”

“…This is in part due to limitations of narrowly imposed experimental grazing research due to different soil, landscape and climate conditions and in part resultant knowledge transfer between researchers and ranchers [14,18,19]. Some studies found that even at low stocking rates, animal preferences lead to patch-selected overgrazing due to inadequate recovery of the palatable species [20,21]. Petrosillo et al [22] pointed out that environmental vulnerability is multi-layered, multi-scale and complex, existing in both the objective physical, biological, and social realm, as well as the subjective realm of individual human perception.…”

Understanding the values behind farmer perceptions of trees on farms to increase adoption of agroforestry in Australia

“…One possible reason for the limited uptake is the complexity of designing agroforestry systems to achieve the broadest possible range of co-benefits to match farming systems (and farmers') diverse objectives (Vanclay 2004). While there is excellent general information on how to design and manage tree plantings to achieve different objectives such as reduced wind and erosion or improved water quality (Bird et al 1992), it can be difficult for farmers to match available advice to their own specific situations (Mann and Sherren 2018). Farm advisory services are well placed to support farmers to design agroforestry systems, but the number of publicly funded farm advisors is dwindling (Fleming et al 2014).…”

Effects of High Impact Grazing on Species Diversity and Plant Functional Groups in Grasslands of Northern Argentina

“…Overgrazing is avoided by having short grazing periods, achieved by some form of rotational grazing [16,22,23]. In a sustainable rotation, the number of cattle and the grazing and resting periods are adjusted to each environment [16,24,25]. In a rotational grazing, stocking rates can be much higher than with continuous grazing and the grazing intensity will be low even at much higher stocking rates than for a continuously grazed pasture.…”